To paraphrase a wise man, with IT projects, you either have the results you want or the reasons why not. In this short article, we identify some of most common “reasons” or excuses companies use for not maximizing the benefits of their IT projects. If any of these look familiar, we invite you to examine whether these reasons are “true,” or simply disempowering excuses for not taking profitable action.  In subsequent articles, we’ll offer alternatives to submitting to each of these excuses.

• The business case has already been signed off and we are reluctant to “backpedal.”

• We simply do not have enough resources to sufficiently examine our business case results, status, pilot, rollout and/or history in a meaningful way.

• Maximizing the benefits of the project would require incremental spending (e.g., training users, time spent on analysis, etc.) and we don’t have the budget.

• Benefits are tough to quantify.

• We’re focused on growth, not on “looking back.”

• The tools to perform benefits analyses are immature and/or insufficient.

• We have too big of a backlog of additional projects to spend additional time and/or resources on this one.

• Nobody here appreciates that even though it’s only a $200K project, it has multi-million dollar impact.

• It’s an infrastructure project – there are no financial “benefits.”

• We have a culture that allows people to make mistakes; we don’t want to castigate anyone.

• Consultants we’ve used in the past made recommendations that looked fine on paper, but implementing them was another story.

Tune in next time as we explore, and explode, some of these myths – and provide suggestions on how to maximize the benefits of your projects in a way that positively impacts the bottom line.